College Women Are More Politically Liberal Than Ever, Research Finds

Feel like every woman around you is sporting a pink pussy hat and a feminist tee these days? Well, a new study shows that, on college campuses at least, you're kind of right about that.

In a recent survey from the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, more than 41 percent of women identified their political leanings as “liberal” or “far left.” That’s an all-time high for the survey, which has been around for 51 years. And it makes for a big gap between college women and their male counterparts—only 29 percent of men identified as liberal.

What issues are driving college women left? Women were more likely than men to say that climate change should be a government priority and that we should have stricter gun-control laws. And more than 90 percent of women agreed with the statement that sex "without the presence of explicit affirmative consent" qualifies as sexual assault. Only 82 percent of men agreed with that statement.

Since the election, a lot of attention has been paid to the fact that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump, but this data actually lines up with voting patterns for young people, and shows that the 2016 election actually helped push some young, college-going women to identify as liberal.

Could the shift left be a result of—of catalyst for—all the political momentum surrounding the recent election and Women’s Marches in January?

The short answer: yes. The survey found that college freshmen in 2016 were more politically engaged than in past years—more than a quarter of them said that they thought it was either “very important” or “essential” that they personally go on to influence politics in their lifetime.

College campuses have been a hotbed for political activism since at least the 1960s, and that's no different today. There's been a surge of protests on campuses recently, often in conjunction with groups like the Black Lives Matter movement, with students demanding more diversity and cultural sensitivity on campus. At Princeton, students demanded that Woodrow Wilson's name be removed from a campus building because of his flawed record on racial issues (the school refused). At Ithaca College students staged a walkout to protest the school's racial insensitivity (the president of the school announced he'll step down in July 2017). After Harvard students complained that the term "house master" connoted images of slavery, the school agreed to change the term for people in charge of residential halls to "faculty dean."

The study's authors noted that there tends to be a spike in political engagement reported during presidential elections years, but this is a far larger spike than usual, which could be because this year’s election was so much more volatile than those in years past.

Which leads us to the other big takeaway from the survey, another all-time high for college freshman: polarization.

In 2016 an all-time-low percentage of students said their political beliefs were “middle of the road”—again, that’s in the half century this survey has been around. The data also shows that only 68 percent of conservative students, 82 percent of “middle of the road” students, and 86 percent of liberal students say they can tolerate people with different beliefs. Which, ugh.

The study's authors recommend that college campuses expand on activities that encourage students to engage with people who hold different views, which seems like a great idea. We’re living in a polarized culture, of course, and college kids aren’t immune to that. But college is supposed to be the place where we interact with new ideas and people from backgrounds that are different than our own. If college campuses are divided over politics, and some students can't even tolerate someone who thinks differently than they do, how are we ever going to get out of this politically polarized mess we're in as a country?